Can I use a Sound City L100 or L120 for bass guitar?
Sure… but remember that bass guitar requires a good deal of headroom in order to reproduce the low-end transients of which basses are capable. And if you’re using a 5-string bass with a low B-string (31 Hz), your headroom requirements are even greater. Because of this headroom requirement for bass guitar, some modern bass amps provide as much as two kilowatts (2000 watts) of power, so what can you expect from a 100-watt or 120-watt tube head that is, perhaps, 30-years old!? You can expect a very good sound IF you remember that you can’t get water from a stone. Very efficient bass speakers (and an efficent cabinet design) can provide more output for a tube head, but only to a point. Also, the inherently and relatively poor damping capability of tube amps can cause excessive speaker excursion (i.e., the speaker will seem to move in and out almost uncontrollably; solid-state amps provide much a better speaker damping capability, but who wants to use a S-S bass amp?). You can reduce this
